Mass Humanities has awarded more than $160,000 to five cultural organizations in the Pioneer Valley to help them sustain or increase their staffing, with the larger goal being to help those groups “create, restore and grow humanities programs.”

The grants are part of what the nonprofit calls its 2023 Staffing Recovery Grant Awards, which have been provided to organizations with budgets of $500,000 or less and five or fewer full-time equivalent employees.

All told, Mass Humanities, the state’s leading funder of humanities programs, has awarded more than $1.2 million to 35 cultural organizations in the state. The organization says the $1.2 million figure marks the largest single grant line in its history. The grants range between $16,000 and $40,000 for each recipient.

In the Pioneer Valley, funding has been provided to the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation in Hadley ($40,000); The LAVA Center in Greenfield ($40,000); Nueva Esperanza in Holyoke ($40,000); the Cummington Cultural District ($24,960); and KlezCummington ($16,000).

The $40,000 grant will enable The LAVA Center to create and fund a part-time humanities coordinator position, bringing stability and continuity to the humanities-based programs that the Main Street community arts center has launched, including indiVISIBLE: Celebrating Indispensable Agricultural Workers, Making Their Stories and Presence Visible and ECHO Greenfield: Exploring and Creating Histories Ourselves.

A job description and guidelines for applying for the humanities coordinator position are available at thelavacenter.org/humanities-coordinator-job-listing. The deadline for applications is July 31.

The grant also enables The LAVA Center to provide a six-week, theater-based workshop taught by Alex DeMelo to support people living with disabilities to share and shape their own stories confidently. It will also allow the center to host oral historians Michael and Carrie Kline of Sunderland, who can offer training in listening and storytelling to The LAVA Center’s project teams and the general public.

The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation, which runs the historical museum of the same name, will use the grant money to fill two new part-time positions, one to oversee educational programs and work with interns, and the other to coordinate preservation work on historical structures on the property.

Susan Lisk, director of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation, says those new positions will help enhance ongoing efforts at the Hadley museum to expand the scope of research and interpretation at the historic property, which dates to the 1750s.

Among the other grant recipients, Nueva Esperanza is a community development organization serving the Puerto Rican/Afro-Caribbean community; the Cummington Cultural District represents art and community projects in the town; and KlezCummington is a festival celebrating Yiddish diasporic cultures.

Funding for these and other organizations came initially from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which earlier this year provided a $2.5 million grant to Mass Humanities as part of the state agency’s Cultural Sector Pandemic Recovery Grants.

“Grassroots humanities organizations drive positive change and a sense of belonging in Massachusetts communities,” Brian Boyles, executive director of Mass Humanities, said in a statement. “This funding provides an influx of support for jobs and programs at a crucial point in our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

These new Mass Humanities grants come on the heels of grants in 2021 and 2022 that distributed about $275,000 to Pioneer Valley cultural organizations for programming designed to tell the stories of underrepresented people and communities.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com. Reporter Mary Byrne contributed to this story.

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